The two leading open-source miscellaneous projects, compared on the signals that predict whether a dependency survives: commit cadence, release history, licence and health.
penpot is the safer default: actively maintained maintenance, 4866 commits in the last twelve months and a health score of 100/100, against 105 commits and 47/100 for revealjs. Licence still decides the commercial question — penpot ships under MPL-2.0, revealjs under MIT. Both are Miscellaneous projects; the category scores 81/100 on saturation with 76 open-source implementations tracked.
| Metric | revealjs | penpot |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | 72k | 59k |
| Maintenance status | Slowing down | Actively maintained |
| Commits (12 months) | 105 | 4866 |
| Commits (3 months) | 0 | 1061 |
| Active months / 12 | 8 | 12 |
| Last commit | 2026-05-21 | 2026-08-14 |
| Last release | 2026-04-11 | 2026-07-22 |
| Licence | MIT | MPL-2.0 |
| Licence family | permissive | copyleft |
| Health score | 47/100 | 100/100 |
| Replaces | — | Figma, Collaborative design tool |
| Repository | hakimel/reveal.js | penpot/penpot |
Repository metadata refreshed August 2026. Stars never decay — read the maintenance rows first.
Framework for easily creating beautiful presentations using HTML.
Web-based design and prototyping platform meant for cross-domain teams.
On maintenance signals, penpot leads: 4866 commits in the last twelve months across 12 active months, versus 105 commits and 8 active months for revealjs. Star counts (72k vs 59k) reflect historical popularity, not current health, so read them second.
revealjs is licensed under MIT (permissive) and penpot under MPL-2.0 (copyleft). Permissive licences (MIT, Apache, BSD) allow closed commercial products. Copyleft (GPL) triggers on distribution and AGPL triggers on network use, which covers SaaS. Source-available licences usually forbid competing hosted services outright.
revealjs is marked slowing down with its last commit recorded 2026-05-21 and 0 commits in the last three months. It does not meet the momentum bar (commits in most of the last twelve months plus a recent release), so treat any dependency as technical debt with a due date.
The Miscellaneous category is rated crowded at 81/100, with 40 maintained implementations. In a crowded category every prospect can find a free version in minutes, so your wedge has to be something maintainers structurally will not build: compliance, SLAs, managed scale or a workflow they reject.
Communication
Software Development
Media Streaming
File Transfer
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Money, Budgeting & Management
Document Management
Games
Two maintained free tools already own this category. IdeaProof scores your idea against live competitors, market size and 1,000+ documented failures in about two minutes.
Validate your idea freeSearch this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.
No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.
Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.